There's No Way Hillary Clinton Has Been Fighting ISIS Her Entire Adult Life

During the first presidential debate of the 2016 general election, Republican nominee Donald Trump — in making his case that Hillary Clinton’s approach to fighting ISIS would not work — made the claim that she has been fighting ISIS her entire adult life.

That claim, like his claim in August that President Obama was the founder of ISIS, does not mesh with the history of the founding of that group.

Meanwhile, though the complicated factors in play in the establishment of ISIS go back for generations and the organization’s founders were operating in the 1990s, it was not until 2013 that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gave the group that name.

An enigmatic leader who shuns the spotlight — there is only one photograph of him in circulation, a grainy head shot the U.S. State Department uses to advertise the $10 million price tag it has put on his head — Baghdadi’s ambitions match bin Laden’s: to create a new caliphate, or state based on Islamic law, stretching across the Middle East and North Africa. Many jihadist leaders have stated this ambition, but Baghdadi is actually carving out a mini-caliphate in parts of both Iraq and Syria. Not even bin Laden, for all his spectacular international terrorist attacks, came close to holding so much as a square meter of territory in any Arab country.

To make his intentions clear, in April 2013, Baghdadi gave al-Qaeda in Iraq a new name: the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS). With operations reaching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, it is al-Qaeda’s most successful affiliate.